Free The Seduction of Molly Brown (The Aloha Stories) by Lynn Cole

The
Seduction of Molly Brown
    the aloha stories
    ~~~
    Molly Brown was sick and tired of people telling
her how beautiful she was. She’d heard it all her life, really, but beautiful
wasn’t something you accomplished, it was an accident of nature. At
least, that was the way Molly thought of beauty. What Molly wanted to be praised for was being strong, independent, athletic, and
intelligent. Yet what she constantly heard at home and at her high school where
she had just graduated was, Molly, you are so beautiful…or Molly, you are so
pretty…or Molly I wish I was as pretty as you…or from random guys around
Oahu…Hey babe!
    At
least the random shouts of Hey Babe! happened to almost every cute girl
in a bikini walking along the Kamehameha Highway, known to locals as The Kam ,
near Sunset Beach on Oahu. Molly was happy living in ‘paradise’, but she
was done with high-school. She was done with the slacker surfer dudes and Oahu-country-boys who had no ambition. Most of the guys that came onto her in high school had
zero ambition…other than finding the perfect wave off of Sunset Beach, or maybe
opening their own Shrimp-Shack down on the Kam.
    Molly loved the ocean and the beach life but she wanted more than that. She had
ambition. She wanted to make a difference. She wanted to become a doctor and to
then come back and work in Hawaii in a rural area that was underserved
medically. She’d busted her tail for four years of high school, often depriving
herself of fun, of the kind of experiences her friends were having, but finally
it had paid off.
    Last
December she’d come home from school and walked into her kitchen from the lanai
that overlooked Oahu’s North Shore and noticed a thick buff-colored envelope lying
on the kitchen island. Her dad, Noel, a retired Navy officer who’d become a
private detective as his ‘retirement job’, sat at the kitchen table reading a Jack
Reacher book on his Kindle and feigning ignorance of the letter.
    “Dad,
what’s this?” Molly asked.
    “
What’s what?”
    “The
letter?”
    “No
idea,” her dad said with a slight smile. “It’s not addressed to me.”
    Molly
picked up the letter and saw the crimson, raised crest of Stanford University
in the left hand corner.
    Holy
crap! She thought.
    “You
gonna open that?” Noel asked.
    Molly
felt her heart racing as she used a butter knife to open the envelope. Then,
her heart felt like it skipped a beat when she read… ”Dear Ms. Brown, we are
happy to welcome you to Leland B. Stanford University as a valued member of the
class of…”
    She’d
made it! All of her hard work had paid off in early acceptance to Stanford. Her
dreams were becoming a reality – finally. But then Christmas break was over and
it was back to the grind of high school and putting up with the idiots and asshats who only saw her as a hot chick, and whose sole goal in life
seemed to be to get into her pants.
    The
rest of the school year dragged by and now the rush of graduation was over and
Molly was awake on the first day of summer vacation. She lay with one leg
tangled in the peach sheets of her bed and felt the warm breeze from her open
window and heard the waves rhythmically breaking on Sunset Beach. The night
before, her dad Noel, had taken her out for a special dinner after her
graduation from high school. She’d been valedictorian and also had won an award
for her leadership as the captain of the cross-country team.
    “I
wish your mom could have been here to see this tonight,” Noel had said, a trace
of tears in his eyes. They were sitting in a quiet corner of The King
Kamehameha Beach Club in Honolulu where they’d gone for dinner after
graduation.
    “I
know, Dad. I wish she could have been there too.”
    They
were both quiet for a moment, thinking of their loss. Molly’s mother, Kim, had
been killed when Molly was thirteen. Kim had been an avid trail runner and was
training for Oahu’s Hurt 100 Endurance Trail Race when a distracted
driver